Tickets for two

Milestones in life differ from client to client. While some have goals aligned with marriage and children, others aspire differently. You might find yourself serving clients who are not planning for what are considered traditional or linear milestones in life.

Rachael Wong Wing Suet, CFP, a five-year MDRT member, provides services to a diverse group of younger clients who have made a deliberate choice not to pursue marriage or are married but don’t want to be parents, often known as dual-income-no-kids couples. They’re mainly young professionals between their late 20s and 40s and are focused on maximizing their dual incomes, so their financial concerns are quite different from the typical household.

“Instead of focusing on estate planning, wealth transfer to children or saving for their kids’ education, these couples are more interested in enjoying life experiences and achieving personal goals,” she said. “They may not prioritize buying a home and often prefer renting. Their goals are more about fulfilling their personal wish lists, such as traveling, achieving unique experiences or dedicating time to meaningful causes. Their needs are less about legacy and more about maximizing enjoyment and fulfillment during their healthiest and most active years.”

Similarly, eight-year MDRT member Yung-Han Cheng has a high proportion of clients between 35 to 45 years old who have dual incomes and are childless by choice. This group is particularly focused on growing their personal wealth.

“Based on my observations, people in this group tend to approach financial planning with a strong emphasis on themselves,” he said. “Whether it’s spending money, enjoying life or setting funds aside, the focus is mostly on their own needs. There’s relatively less consideration for others or for leaving money behind.”

As “taking good care of themselves” becomes the central goal in life, he noticed this priority affects the type of insurance they buy. For example, these clients usually prefer policies that don’t require leaving money to anyone else. They rarely purchase term life insurance. Instead, they’re more likely to buy policies that help ensure they can support themselves in old age, compared with clients who have families and often focus their planning around their children.

Meeting their needs

To help them identify and clarify their personal goals, Wong uses techniques that help her understand what they want out of life, such as discussing their bucket list to uncover what truly excites them and the experiences they want to pursue. She asks what they want to experience in life that would make their lives exciting and create lasting memories. Some may want to witness Africa’s Great Migration of wildebeests, zebras and gazelles. Others may dream of piloting a small plane. One client expressed a desire to spend a year volunteering with Doctors Without Borders in Africa.

Once their goals are clear, she works on a step-by-step strategy with her clients to achieve these ambitions. The strategy involved identifying the required funds, planning for early cash flow and structuring their finances.

“In terms of financial planning, I advise them to focus on cash flow management and early withdrawals, so they can enjoy their wealth during their prime years. For example, setting withdrawal points at ages 35 or 45 instead of waiting until 65, and recommending financial products and strategies that are matched to their unique goals and timelines,” she said.

Cheng encourages these clients to allocate their budget wisely: Reserve a portion for insurance and use the rest to explore investments or try out newer, more innovative financial tools. This kind of flexible structure allows them to better respond to future changes and opportunities.

“If someone were to put their entire budget into insurance — locking into 10 or 20-year contracts — their funds would be tied up, and they would lose flexibility,” Cheng said. “I don’t want my clients to miss out on other financial opportunities just because everything is committed to insurance. That’s why I prefer a balanced approach, blending protection with agility. Insurance provides a safety net, while investments keep things dynamic and responsive for their lifestyle needs.”

Dual-income-no-kids clients are typically more proactive in seeking out new information, and their ability to absorb and respond to new financial knowledge is often much stronger than married couples with children.

“That’s understandable, since parents usually have their attention focused on raising kids and naturally spend less time keeping up with outside trends,” Cheng said. He also encourages them to start learning how to manage their finances now, while they still have time to build good habits and the knowledge needed to live with greater confidence later on.

Planning in advance also includes making plans for the golden years and ultimately, death. He recalls a client, a former college classmate, who told him that he probably wouldn’t get married or have children in the future. The first policy he got was a personal health insurance plan followed by a long-term care insurance policy some years later to prepare for old age. By then, the client had a partner but told him, “Even though I’m in a stable relationship now, let’s be honest …”

Cheng understood him perfectly. Aging, childfree couples do not have the option to appoint their children to make decisions in the event one of them becomes incapacitated or passes away. At the very least, they should thoughtfully select beneficiaries or leave instructions to avoid unintended consequences.

“That’s why I encouraged him to plan ahead. We even talked about practicing writing a will and setting up a trust. I truly believe that when you combine a trust, insurance and a will, you can get the nearly perfect management of retirement, asset distribution and end-of-life planning,” he said, adding that he always believed that insurance is a critical part of any financial plan for clients, but it shouldn’t stand alone. It needs to work in tandem with other tools.

Even though childfree couples may have less interest in buying life insurance compared to couples with children, they should know about the “living benefits” of coverage, said Pamela J. Sams, CRPC. They can build up cash value or equity with whole or universal life index insurance, which can turn into a useful resource for funding retirement or accessing long-term care.

“They may not have a beneficiary to leave it to, but that’s how I position the life insurances,” the six-year MDRT member said, adding that these couples still need to plan for providing financial security to the surviving spouse or partner in case the other dies.

The wish lists for her clients typically include lots of travel and buying vacation homes, particularly want-to-be snowbirds who intend to eventually move from cold to warm climates during the winter, among other luxury pursuits.

Another common desire is early retirement. Fifty-five years old is the target age Sams often hears as a goal from clients. As they tend to have more disposable income, they can save more aggressively to retire early. But she has to prepare them for the consequences. Stepping away from work early means they’ll no longer have their employer-provided health insurance, so they’ll need to put money away to buy their own individual health care coverage, which will cost more than the monthly premiums they paid for their employer’s plan, until the government-sponsored insurance kicks in when they are 65.

So, she works backward from their needs and goals and establishes a number of buckets for savings and investments to support each one. There’s the bucket for health insurance, a bucket for building retirement savings, and another that clients can draw income from between 55 and when they become eligible to withdraw money from retirement savings. Among the buckets is one for funding the lifestyle choices they want to pursue.

“I do what is called retirement income time segmentation to explain each of those buckets,” Sams said. “The first two or three buckets are going to be more conservative because that is more immediate income that they will need, and you don’t want to risk too much. So that could be annuities, fixed annuities, index annuities or some type of guaranteed income for that bucket. Then maybe Buckets 4 through 6 is more of that engine that will keep going and fund those lifestyle things like trips or the vacation home depending on the time horizon for those things.”

Each bucket will have its own risk tolerance and targeted rate of return based largely on the time horizon of the clients’ goals. If a couple already has a sizable down payment saved to purchase a second home they want to purchase in three to five years, investments in that bucket will be conservative compared to a wish list item with a longer-term objective.

Protection for the long term

Chi Teng Han, CIAM, ChFC/S, an 18-year MDRT member, also has noticed another group of clients — those without a spouse or kids. While their needs for the future are fairly similar, they expect to retire by 50.

“They are very confident about keeping their expenses low and hence can retire earlier than their married peers. They tend to search for self-fulfillment in their jobs,” he said.

Han offers financial advisory services by giving them articles to read and focus on educating and equipping them with relevant knowledge. “I advise them to focus on protection, long-term savings and retirement planning. I tell them that it’s impossible to build a comprehensive plan in one day. I then follow up every year to review and adjust according to their situation,” he said.

An example of such a client is a woman holding a very high position in her company, who was very confident about her financial planning capabilities and seldom faced opposition when it came to her decision making. She told Han not to sell her any other forms of protection besides a medical plan. But Han persisted.

“I told her she needed to ensure that her income streams were guaranteed, because one day, her active income will stop, prematurely or otherwise,” he said. “We started by building multiple passive income streams, and after advising her for some time, I managed to work with her on the protection bit.”

While these clients who fall into the categories of dual income no kids or single by choice are largely aware of their future needs, they could often benefit from closer financial alignment with help from experienced advisors. By synchronizing their financial plans with their personal aspirations in the long run, such clients will be able to achieve a meaningful and fulfilling experience out of the lifestyle they choose and prepare for the future ahead.

Dual income, no borders

By Mike Beirne

The term DINKs, or dual income, no kids, was first used during the late 1970s to label childless-by-choice couples in the U.S. Since then, the phenomenon of young adults delaying or eschewing traditional life choices like marriage and/or starting families has gone worldwide and is growing.

In China, dingke — the phonetic translation of DINKs in Mandarin — composed 38% of households in 2020 (although that figure also included people living alone as single), up from 28% in 2010, per the Luoyang Institute of Science and Technology. The high cost of raising children in Japan and career aspirations were among the reasons 55.2% of 18 to 29-year-olds said they did not want children in the future, according to a 2023 survey by Rohto Pharmaceutical. While being a DINK is a lifestyle choice and not a demographic category specifically tracked by some national and international statistical agencies, the trend of declining birth rates and aging populations — 57 of 63 countries with high gross national incomes also had fertility rates in 2024 below the pace needed for a population to replace itself from one generation to the next, according to the World Bank — portends of a growing segment of financial services prospects with their own set of consumer behaviors.

“The rise of DINKs isn’t a rejection of parenthood. It’s a generation’s response to economic trauma, turning financial security into ultimate luxury,” said Libby Rodney, chief strategy officer for The Harris Poll, which completed a 2024 survey showing that 60% of millennials (born 1981–1996) and Gen Z (1997–2012) in the U.S. considered finding and/or moving in with a romantic partner to split expenses.

Those generations grew up experiencing wars, recessions and a pandemic, so they are more pessimistic about matters regarding finance, home ownership and saving enough for retirement. Compared to when Gen X (1965-1980) and baby boomers (1946-1964) were their age, they also started their working careers later due to entering adulthood during a difficult labor market and have accumulated less wealth.

“This makes the topic of financial security really important for these generations,” Alison Salka, senior vice president of the Life Insurance Marketing and Research Association (LIMRA) said during a 2023 webcast about Gen Z and millennials. “They’re maturing at a different rate, which affects how they are making financial decisions. It’s critically important to help them become financially secure and protect the things they value.”

While the average American uses their money to merely survive, DINKs use theirs to build financial stability and to enjoy life by upgrading the product, services and experiences they buy, per The Harriss Poll. DINKs spend four times more than the average American adult on dining and have double the typical budget for vacation trips. However, young adults are also recognizing that they have a needs gap as they reach life stages when insurance purchases are likely. A top reason for buying is the potential for long-term care expenses depleting their savings as they age, according to the 2024 Insurance Barometer study by LIMRA and Life Happens. But 44% think insurance is too expensive, and 36% said they can’t afford it. Yet, more than half of millennials and Gen Z combined overestimate the cost of life insurance by more than three times its actual price.

Also, many don’t understand the value of insurance and are intimidated by the purchase process. A 2025 Insurance Europe survey of young adults in 33 countries showed 57% described buying insurance as complicated and burdened by paperwork, and 7 in 10 expressed a desire for more consumer-friendly information. They want the products to be simple, easy to buy and more relevant to their lifestyle, like rent-centric policies, user-based auto insurance, or income protection with flexible payment breaks for when their gig careers hit a dry spell or the cost of living increases.

“We see an opportunity now in embedded insurance,” Salka said. “About 3 in 10 say they would be interested in a life insurance policy that is bundled with a P&C policy because they’re thinking about risks at that time. A quarter would be interested in a policy bundled with a mortgage. There are a lot of opportunities to engage with these groups and provide things they need like guaranteed income in retirement, wellness programs and incentives, which are important particularly when you have these high levels of anxiety.”